Traditional style flash design of a black coffin with a skeleton hand emerging from it, flanked by grey flowers and olive leaves, with a WIDE AWAKE banner below.

Coffin with skeleton hand and banner

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a black coffin with orange studded edges and a grey lid, with a white skeleton hand reaching out of its side. Two grey five-petal flowers with orange centres and olive and green leaves frame the coffin, and a cream banner reading WIDE AWAKE with red shading sits across the base. The bold black outlines, flat fills and light wood-grain detail on the coffin side are typical of traditional flash.

Traditional Coffin Skeleton hand Flower Leaves Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys says nobody sleeps properly on a bakery floor, but she has never tried it, so I take her word for nothing before five. At half past three the ovens are roaring, flour has settled into the creases of my forearms, and the radio is murmuring the shipping forecast to no one. I knead the tin loaves against the steel table, slap and fold, slap and fold, the way my dad taught me in a kitchen in Hull where the windows always ran with damp.

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The coffin belongs to Mr Okonedo from the funeral parlour across the road. He left it by our bins on Tuesday with a note saying the lid had warped and the wood was too good to skip. Dilys wanted it in the shop window, and I said no customer would buy rye next to a box for the dead. Then at four I went out for the milk crates and found the lid had slid an inch, and a bony hand rested on the rim, fingers spread as if checking the weather.

I did not scream, which I count as a victory. I went back in, switched off the radio and stood very still until the bread timer shrieked. When I looked again the hand had not moved, and the pale grain down the side of the box seemed to ripple with the heat from the ovens. Dilys came in at half five, took one look at my face and laughed until she had to sit on a sack of flour.

We propped the lid open, fetched the chalk and wrote WIDE AWAKE across the board by the door, underlined twice in red. By six the queue reached the postbox, and every person who read it glanced at the coffin, then the hand, then me. I told them the buns were fresh. That was the truth, and the hand, politely, kept its fingers to itself.